Mon, 23 Aug 2010

Programming Languages Are Not Zero Sum

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation
in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or
gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants
are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

Being advocate, implementor, tester and co-designer of a new programming language, I often hear objections
along the lines of you are killing $other_programming_language, combined
with a mixture of fear and resentment. People are afraid that having a new
player on the market will decrease
market share of their own, favorite programming language.

While I can understand these thinking patterns, there is no reason for
concern. The market for programming languages is not a zero-sum situation.
While I don't have hard data, I have the impression that the programming job
sector is growing, and the US
government expects it to grow further, too.

Certainly the growth
of world population sets a rapidly increasing baseline, and even if we
assume a constant percentage of all people related to programming in some way,
the total number of programmers rises, and will continue for quite some
time.

(I'm pointing to some resources about programming jobs, and I fully realize that
it's not the same as number of overall programmers; but it's easier to get
data for jobs, and I do think that the general trend statements are true for
both).

A recent Linux
distribution trend analysis fell into the same trap: it shows
relative numbers of search terms, and talks about a decline
for all distributions except Ubuntu. Again I don't have hard numbers (the
mirror infrastructure of most Linux distributions makes it nearly impossible
to get accurate download counts), but I haven't seen any evidence that total
usage numbers of any of the Linux distributions actually decreased.